When I say supercompensation isn’t entirely wrong, I mean that the notion of a limited pool of “recovery energy”, that our capacity to recover from punishment has limits, is not entirely unfounded. Any extreme physical trauma or illness can readily demonstrate the limits of the human body, and it isn’t terribly difficult for an athlete, recreational or otherwise, to find that point. Biology does have limits to what it can handle, and that isn’t in question.
However, we also assume that our powers of recovery never change throughout our life. A lifter reaches some “normal” level, able to handle squatting twice or maybe three times a week, but no more. You’re riding a fine line, and doing more is simply impossible. Don’t even think about it.
We are of course back at the ideas of the HIT and Hardgainer schools, who believe that more training leads to diminishing returns. Physical exercise and recovery from it exist in an “either-or” dance of negative feedback. You can either do lots of training, or you can be well-rested. Never both.
You might find some progressive thinkers who grudgingly agree that training more does lead to larger absolute results, but these gains are only marginal when compared to the efficiency of fewer workouts. According to this thinking, the majority of your gains come from a baseline of two or three weekly workouts. This creates perhaps 80-90% of your possible gains. Further sessions might add to your progress, but only in proportionally smaller increments. A fourth session might only add 5%, a fifth only 2%, and so on. Instead of milking that 90% and calling it a day, you’d be adding two extra days for a piddling 7% on top of your gains. After a point it becomes so time-inefficient that you’d be a fool to bother.
There is research in favor of this view. Meta-analyses done independently by Matthew Rhea of Arizona State University and Mathias Wernbom of Sweden’s Göteborg University analyzed the body of published strength-training studies and identified inverted-U “sweet spots” for both frequency and volume.24 The inverted-U is like a camel’s hump on a graph. Toward the zero-point, stimulus is low and the effect is low; you don’t do much and you don’t get much back. At the high end, stimulus is high and the effect is still low, suggesting that more isn’t always better if you overwhelm yourself in the process. The effect is maximized near the middle, when a moderate stimulus generates the largest the effect.
Rhea and Wernbom independently reached similar conclusions on the effects of strength-training based on the findings of published research. Frequency maxes out around two or three sessions per week per exercise, and number of work sets starts at around four for a beginner and expands to around eight in more advanced athletes. This all fits with, if not a perspective of Doing Less, at least an eye towards moderation. That’s a position I find reasonable ― not aiming to do the least possible amount of training, but an ideal amount of training to net you the best-possible gains for the work that you do.
But there is a caveat. The papers used in these meta-analyses were largely limited to the untrained or lightly-trained subjects so often used in academic exercise science, with a
paucity of data on more advanced athletes. These numbers were only ever intended to illustrate what works as a theoretical starting point, and for that purpose they work wonderfully. Let’s keep them there, as guidelines rather than the final answer.
The idea of a finite point, an ultimate limit, just makes no sense. Even the language of “moderation” depends on this, however, and it is not at all clear that this is accurate. Are we actually capable of assigning what percentage of our realized gains came from any single work set? Not likely.
What these papers do indicate clearly is a trend towards “more” as athletes become more trained over time. Workloads used in training expand and unfold as you improve, trending toward more sets and more workouts as strength improves over a career. Your body becomes more resistant to overload as you get stronger, and as a consequence of that resistance you need “more” in order to encourage adaptation.
That’s an important hint, and I think it should lead us to question supercompensation. The scope of evidence drawn from outside exercise physiology suggests that our bodies just don’t work like that, and there are good reasons to consider alternatives. Banister’s fitness- fatigue model, as one conspicuous example, explains why you’d have the appearance of supercompensation in some situations, like a beginner just finding her legs in the gym, but it can also explain more things ― like the unpacking of workloads in more advanced lifters, or the Frequency Project.
From all this, I believe that there is no fixed limit as such. Rather, we’re dealing with a dynamic, unstable limit that can change depending on how much you train (or don’t).
Stress has positive effects, after all, and the entire point of adaptation is to make your body more resistant to whatever it perceives as a threat. The limit changes every time you set foot in the gym.
Russian sports science, while still using the imagery of gadaptive energy h, knew that improving robustness was a critical goal of physical training (and they knew that there were no real energies, but rather underlying biological processes that restored you to a state of normalcy). In Supertraining Mel Siff wrote that “the capacity of these [adaptive] reserves is not fixed, but alters in response to the demands placed on them by stresses such as training.”25 Recovery itself, in as much as the word has a meaning at all, can be trained with practice. The more you expose yourself to stressful events, within reason, the less stressful they become.
On one level this is obvious. A workout that absolutely floors a beginner can be a light day for an advanced lifter. You don’t stop training in your first few months of lifting weights because you got really sore after those workouts. We take it for granted that we’ll become more robust with experience, at least in that dimension.
Instead of diminishing returns, we can think start thinking about positive feedback ― that doing more can, in turn, create more. Training and recovery are more of a “both-and” situation, rather than the “either-or” of supercompensation. Your body’s condition, its ability to handle stress and to recover from it, depends at least in part on being exposed to stress in the first place.
into a more robust condition, such that you can not only handle more training, but thrive on
it.
You can’t do that with a fixed cap on your recuperative powers. But treating the body as a “growth system”, one with limits but still far more adaptable than you might otherwise believe, gives us this option. We are less machines with limited resources and more ecosystems which can adapt and grow with the right encouragement.
You wouldn’t run your garden like a factory, thinking in terms of efficiencies and maximum-minimum outputs. Gardeners tend rather than manage. Tending our bodies is a matter of exposing yourself to stress and gradually increasing that stress, but in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm you. Hanging out in stress-mode all the time is bad, but spending a lot of time cruising with occasional bursts of all-in effort is actually good for you. This pattern of under- and over-stimulation is crucial (more on this later).
What this all means is that you can train far more, and far harder, than you might otherwise believe. Want to train the same exercise five days in a row? Six? Seven? You can, and you can benefit from all of those workouts. You eventually have to pay down your fatigue debt, of course, and in order to see your gains realized ― to see that new muscle growth, to lift a new PR weight ― you may have to let the fatigue bleed off.
But this is not about recharging your hitpoints. Instead, we’re letting the stress- response stabilize and settle down. It doesn’t matter if you train “legs” or “arms” two or three or five days a week as long as you allow for adaptation to occur at some point in time.
Once you stop looking at recovery as hitpoints, a whole world of new possibilities opens up. Training is a continual process of biological growth and change which is balanced and checked by accumulated wear-and-tear. You’re always walking on a knife’s blade, at “the edge of chaos” so to speak, but as your fitness level grows, so does your ability to tolerate a thrashing. You can handle more intensity as weights get heavier, and more volume and more workouts as work capacity improves. The result is a system which grows to match what it’s been trained to do.
It would be unfair to say that workouts based on supercompensation “can’t work”, because obviously they can and do. Minimalist-style workouts, ranging from straight-up HIT to meat-and-potatoes powerlifting workouts work, and work just fine. For some people.
I don ft think supercompensation is wrong as much as it is incomplete, and it fs in the incompleteness that we find possibilities.